On the whole, closing airport's tower won't fly

Thanks to the sequester, the federal air controllers in Stockton's airport tower might be furloughed. The airport could become an "uncontrolled field."

Michael Fitzgerald

Thanks to the sequester, the federal air controllers in Stockton's airport tower might be furloughed. The airport could become an "uncontrolled field."

How's that going to work?

I was braced for bad news. The shrug of an answer came as a surprise.

"There's safety procedures in place that we follow," said Patrick T. Carreno, the director of Stockton Metropolitan Airport. "The pilots, they're trained to go through uncontrolled airports."

So much for the lurid and sensational lobe in the reporter's brain that thought he'd hear, "If the air controllers are furloughed, all hell will break loose. We're talking midair collisions, carnage."

In fact, pilots land safely at thousands of uncontrolled airports nationwide. Locally, the airports at Tracy, Byron, Oakdale, Lodi-Kingdon, Lodi-Hwy 99, and Franklin near Elk Grove are uncontrolled.

Even Stockton's airport is uncontrolled overnight when "operations" (landings and takeoffs) are scarce.

Here's how the system works. During the day, Stockton's tower has responsibility for air traffic within a five-mile radius and an altitude from the surface up to 2,500 feet.

But if the air controllers are furloughed, pilots just switch to a "common traffic advisory frequency." Pilots keep a healthy distance from each other by radio communications.

In good weather, they don't even need radio. They can eyeball it.

"I learned how to fly at an airport in Kalispell, Mont., 25 years ago," said Rick Tutt, a commercial pilot. "At that airport we had airlines, military, emergency medical, crop dusting, parachute jumping and flight training. We all spoke to one another on the radio and we all coordinated with each other our arrivals and departures. And it all worked out really well."

Stockton is not a busy airport (a comedian who flew in for a Stockton gig once told me, "I couldn't even get arrested there.") It has one passenger airline, Allegiant. Allegiant runs one or two flights daily.

No cargo companies currently operate there. Roughly 150 small planes come and go every day. That's an average of 11 landings or takeoffs an hour between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m., when the tower is staffed.

That doesn't mean nothing can go wrong. But Stockton's airport is well within the range of airports that can manage without air traffic controllers.

"Some airlines prefer to have towers, especially as your total operations go up," Carreno said. "If there's more aircraft flying around in the pattern they want to see more safety there. That's where the controllers come in."

But no specific business deals are jeopardized by the prospect of a furloughed tower, Carreno said.

Stockton's airport has never seen a major air crash. Unless you count one in 1946, when two military B-29s collided over Stockton in heavy fog. The planes crashed west of town. Eighteen airmen died. Three survived.

Air traffic control is a matter of not only of safety but efficiency, said Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

Air traffic controllers move air traffic along faster. Without them, "fewer flights will be able to take off and land and the traveling public and the many businesses that rely on our air travel system will be impacted by the delays," Church said.

That's truer of big airports. For Stockton, air traffic controllers are an extra margin of safety. But Stockton could manage without them, if it had to.

A budget hawk might say if we can do without 11 federal employees, we should. The county, which pays utilities and other overhead on the tower, would save money, too.

A local economist would want to keep the high-paying salaries in the community.

I say Stockton's air controller tower is one of the few areas in which Uncle Sam does more than the minimum for Stockton. May the ax fall elsewhere.